Unwanted Visitor: The Cruel Case of George and Emma Klose

   It’s the story of a Mokena family. An elderly brother and sister who should’ve been living out days of peace in the sunset of their lives, when they were visited by a heinous crime, one that garnered headlines around Will County. The long timeline of our village’s history is flecked with dots of unsavoriness, which can be found if one pulls back the covers and knows just where to look. On the record of the years is the deadly 1864 riot, the 1926 murder of sheriff’s deputy Walter Fisher, and even the robbery of the Mokena post office in 1937. One that might very well join this nefarious list is the Emma and George Klose case of 1962. 

   The family at the heart of this event, the Kloses, were an old one, one that stood for all that was upright. They were rugged, hardworking farm folk; sons and daughters of the soil, who were a vital part of the social fabric of old Mokena. Patriarch Louis Klose first showed up as a middle-aged man within the borders of Frankfort Township by way of the Kingdom of Bavaria. Ours was a neighborhood were many of his fellow countrymen had already made their home, and while history has kept from us the exact date in which he first set foot here, all indications are that it occurred in the 1850s, roughly congruent with the time Mokena was born in 1852. At some point between his arrival in our neck of the woods and 1860, Louis Klose carved out a home for himself on a tract of land bisected by the new Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad in the northern reaches of the township, at a place that years later was known as the southwestern corner of Route 45 and 187^th Street. 

 

   Over the years, while in the hands of subsequent generations of the Klose family, this quaint farm established by their forebear would come to encompass over 127 acres. As history would have it, by and by the geographical region in which the Klose estate found itself came to be called Summit Hill, in reference to its elevation relative to the rest of the township. In time, the large farm came into the hands of Louis Klose’s son John, who married Philipena Mast in 1871, the daughter of another long-established family. Like his father, John was a native of Bavaria, where he was born in 1850. The young Klose was brought to our environs as a four-year-old by his uncle Johann Zahn, who eventually would become an innkeeper in Mokena and no small figure in our burg’s narrative. 

 

   On his property northeast of the village, John Klose became successful raising livestock and running a dairy farm. He was an active Republican, served as a school director and was a member of St. John’s German Evangelical Church. He had a passion for horticulture, and transformed his farm into one of the most lush places in the Mokena area. He was called a “well-known, highly esteemed citizen of Frankfort Township”, while years after he passed in 1918, it would be said that “Mr. Klose had many friends in this part of the state who have the kindest recollections of him.”

 

   Any recounting of this pioneer family would be remiss not to detail the children of John and Philipena Klose. Their eldest was George, born in 1872, who never married and stayed on the family homestead. Next came Oscar in 1873, who moved to town around the turn of the 20^th century and became our village constable, sporting a dashing uniform and patrolling the streets in the early 1900s. John Philip came onto the scene in 1875, he later married and ran a 100-acre farm of his own a little east of the old Klose place. Emma rounded them out in 1881. Like her brother George, she never married, and spent her days on the homestead with him. Emma Klose was possessed of a gift for music, and sealed her place in immortality by writing and publishing her magnum opus, the jaunty Mokena March and Two Step in 1910.

The Klose farm as it appeared in 1955. Route 45 can be seen in the right foreground, with 187th Street at the top of the image. Today this piece of land is the site of Thunder Bowl on Old LaGrange Road. 

 

   The apple didn’t fall far from John Klose’s tree with his children George and Emma, who inherited his love of plants and trees. They kept up the work he started, and in 1928 alone, George planted 50 evergreens on the property, while Emma was said to “devote many hours to her large garden of flowers and plants.” While the brother and sister lived pastoral lives, they were no strangers to crime. In 1914, a horse, buggy and double set of harnesses were brazenly stolen from their brother John Philip Klose farm, just a stone’s throw from theirs. All in all though, things were generally peaceful in their patch of Midwestern earth. The idyll was shattered on July 12^th, 1962.

 

   On that terrifying, early Thursday morning, George Klose had already reached a respectable 90 years, while his younger sister Emma, was 81. The Route 45 the Kloses lived on in 1962 would be one completely unrecognizable to modern eyes. What is today a bustling suburban thoroughfare, was then a narrow road totally rural in character, rich in agricultural surroundings. Thick foliage in front of the Klose farmhouse shielded it to most passersby, which to the elderly siblings was a nice buffer from the outside world, but gave an upper hand to anyone with barbarity in his heart. 

 

   The first eerie red flag went up around 10 o’clock on Wednesday night, July 11^th. A rap was heard on the Kloses’ door, and when Emma answered it, she beheld a stranger in the rain, who asked to come inside and out of the elements. Rightly spooked by the man, she refused to let him in. The episode appeared to be over, until brother and sister awoke sometime around 2:00 the next morning in great shock, when they found the same man in their living room. He was rather short; they estimated he must have been about five feet, three inches tall, who wore a long white coat that hid his body type. He was young too, looking to be in his 20s, with a round face.

 

   He preceded to squirt a bulb syringe in Emma’s face, dousing her with ammonia. She defended herself by knocking the device out of the intruder’s hand, to which he responded by punching the elderly lady in the face. The same treatment was dealt out to George, who was knocked down and suffered a fractured jaw in the attack. The intruder demanded to know where the money was from the farm’s sale. He was slow on getting the news though – the farm had been sold ten years before, and the money gained from the sale had long since been invested. Even as the two protested there was no cash around, the burglar refused to take them at their word, and tied them to a pair of chairs. 

 

   The stranger began torturing George Klose, “twisting and bending” his fingers back, until in desperation, the elderly man admitted that there was some cash in an upstairs safe. The thief found the small, antique contraption and threw it down the stairs in an attempt to break it open. That having failed, he was able to find the key and make off with the money inside, about $400, which in today’s figures would equal roughly $3,700. Adding insult to, quite literally, injury, he took the keys for a car sometimes driven by Emma and left the house. Here he encountered a hitch, for when he drove out of the yard, the back wheels sunk themselves into a hole, and try as he may, the car wouldn’t budge. The brutal bandit took off on foot, disappearing into the night. 

 

   The trouble had only just begun for George and Emma. They were left tied up, and after hours of struggling, Emma got free at around 6 o’clock in the morning. After untying her brother, she made the horrifying discovery that their phone line had also been cut. The 81-year-old, after having been roughed up and bound for hours, was forced in the early morning dew to walk to the home of Paul Smith. The only problem was, that Smith was on the same party line as the Kloses, so his phone was also out. He drove into Frankfort to the intersection of Routes 30 and 45, where he called the sheriff’s department, as well as a doctor and ambulance from a service station. 

 

   The shocking brutality of this episode was front page news in Mokena’s News-Bulletin, and was also written up in the county seat’s Herald-News, with both papers screaming the news from their front pages. Investigators from the sheriff’s office said the would-be yegg had gained entrance to the farmhouse by breaking the front door. As to the suspect himself, lawmen were tight-lipped to the press, cryptically noting only that the physical description given to them by the elderly brother and sister matched an individual from the neighborhood who had recently gone missing. Whoever he was, he was familiar not only with the layout of the farm and its surroundings, but also with the fact that the Kloses kept a dozen dogs on the place, and knew that they were not to be feared. 

 

   George and Emma were taken to St. James Hospital in Chicago Heights, where staff kept press photographers away from them. As far as the historical record states, no justice was ever served in this case. George Klose lived for a further five years after the brutal attack, reaching the impressive age of 95 before he passed in 1967, when he was joined by his sister Emma two years later. Both came to repose in their family plot at St. John’s Cemetery in Mokena, a burial ground that their family had been using for 100 years by this point. The last vestige of the Klose farm, its huge dairy barn, disappeared in the early 1980s. Let us remember Emma and George Klose not for the abhorrent act endured by them in 1962, but instead for the fact that they were a peaceful Mokena family, one who tilled the soil, as did their parents and grandparents at the same spot. They helped feed America, and turned their own corner of our community into one of its most beautiful places.